Cross-post, I suppose.

I would normally post this in my reading journal, ebwreads, but since I've only just learned how to post pics, and this is a paid account and the other is not, it's going here.

Lady in the Lake, Raymond Chandler. Random House, 1943. Library book.

This was just too good to be true, but as Chandler so astutely points out in this book, sometimes, there really are coincidences. I randomly checked this book out of the library to read, and I randomly happened to start it today, and my husband randomly chose to have us truck up Wilshire Blvd in LA today. But there are some historical markers on the street, and we paused at one that referred to the adjacent Bryson Apartments as featured in Chandler's Lady in the Lake. Duuuude! How did you know that I am reading it RIGHT NOW?

So in tribute, here is a short except (and if you've never read Chandler, do. Detective novels don't get any better than this). The narrator is private eye Phillip Marlowe, and Degarmo is a policeman. They're calling on his employer's secretary, who lives at Bryson Apartments, in the middle of the night.

Degarmo lunged past the desk toward an open elevator beside which a tired old man sat on a stool waiting for a customer. The clerk snapped at Degarmo's back like a terrier.

"One moment please. Whom did you wish to see?"

Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. "Did he say 'whom'?"

"Yeah, but don't hit him," I said. "There is such a word."

Degarmo licked his lips. "I knew there was," he said. "I often wondered where they kept it."

And here is the Bryson Apartments.




And




Cool beans.